Artists

John Rivas is a Salvadoran American figurative painter whose sculptural, mixed-media portraits document the people, memories, and material culture of his family and immigrant community. Working across paint, fabric, embroidery, wood, and found household objects — from corn and beans to heirloom textiles — Rivas builds compositions that occupy space more like assemblage or relief than traditional painting, using each material's history to reinforce the story it tells.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Rivas grew up as a first-generation American shaped by relatives he often knew only through photographs and family stories. That distance between generations became the foundation of his practice: many of his subjects are drawn directly from his mother's photo albums and from relatives he has met only remotely, rendered with an eye toward preserving their narratives before they are lost. His raw, expressive brushwork and layered materials point to a family history of farming and construction labor, which Rivas has cited as the source of the roughness and texture in his work.

Rivas earned his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Columbia University. His practice has since developed into two parallel bodies of work: intimate mixed-media paintings that layer paint with found and gifted materials, and, more recently, hand-carved and painted wooden sculpture inspired by traditions of polychrome carving. He has held solo and two-person exhibitions at François Ghebaly in Los Angeles and New York and at Ross + Kramer Gallery in New York, and his work has been included in group exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum, Anthony Gallery in Chicago, and UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles.

Rivas's work is held in the public collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and his continued exploration of Salvadoran identity and the immigrant experience has established him as a distinctive voice among a new generation of artists reclaiming and documenting Latinx family history through material and memory.